Well as you know I’ve been on my travels recently, so this Saturday and next it’s the highlights of my trip to Obidos’s bookshops… And part one is the Livraria de Santiago, because why not when it looks like this!
It’s an ex-church, it’s gorgeous and the book selection is excellent.
I mean look at it. It’s just such a nice mix of old and new, and it’s so full of books!
Here are the two ends of RF/Rebecca Kuang – do note that in Portuguese they’re both under RF Kuang.
Also there was a Mallory Towers omnibus and how could I not take a picture!
There’s also a fair few romance novels – in translation and by local authors – and plenty of YA. All in all, great fun.
And to finish, here’s the outside – which is out to keep the fact it’s a bookshop secret!
Were we in the north recently? Did I find a bookshop to visit? Did I make a purchase? Yes on all counts. And it was a delightful bookshop so of course I’m writing about it!
The Hedgehog Bookshop has two floors of lovely books and goodies. The first floor has kids books and stationery and all that sort of thing. But upstairs is where the good stuff is on a book front from my point of view.
In one room there’s a nice comfy sofa with a hedgehog cushion where you can sit and peruse your choice from what seemed like a very thoughtfully curated selection of fiction, with something for practically anyone I would have thought.
There are best sellers, BookTok picks, recent top sellers, modern classics, evergreen picks and a big old selection of crime and mystery of various types. This was not the only crime bookshelf…
And in the other room there’s an eclectic mix of non-fiction, again with something for pretty much anyone across history, celebrity memoir, cookery, the whole lot.
My purchase was a book about the history of cathedral architecture which you could see in the bonus books incoming the other week. Have a great weekend.
You knew this was coming. I can’t go on holiday without trying to spot some books. We didn’t make it to a supermarket this time, so I don’t have any Spanish covers for English books this time, you’ll have to put yo with my general exasperation with the choices at the airport W H Smiths.
And it is Smiths, plural, beauty this is the best I could do from two of them – both good sized because I’m not counting the one tiny set of shelves in the one I went in before security. There are a lot of familiar suspects here I really struggled to find two books to buy – one of the reactions I ended up in two skips was because I couldn’t find what I wanted in the first one. So we have Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow,Lessons in Chemistry, The Thursday Murder Club and Really Good, Actually along with some crime that clearly too creepy for me!
And here we have even more creepy cover crime, more Richard Osman, a Robert Galbraith, some literary fiction and fantasy and the new Victoria Hislop.
This one is a little better, but I have In At The Deep End in the kindle backlog, the Lucy Score is in Kindle Unlimited (I even had it borrowed at the time even if I still haven’t read it), I’ve read The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and the new YA Ali Hazelwood along with even more Richard Osman, literary fiction and some Colleen Hoover.
And finally, some non-fiction. They had Arnie, and Guenter from Drive to Survive, Matthew Perry, Jada Pinkett Smith and finally the book I had been looking for – David Michell’s Unruly. And if I tell you that the copy you see is the only copy there was, you’ll understand why I felt lucky to get it, even if it was a bit bumped and the spine was already broken. At which point I went back and picked up a novel I hadn’t heard of before from one of the previous shelves, but I’m not telling you which, so it can be a surprise when it pops in Books Incoming!
My conclusion from all this is that our September holiday clearly happened after all the big autumn books for the airports came out, and this one was too soon for anything else to have supplanted them. Hopefully but next holiday though…
Do you remember how excited I got only a few weeks ago about the romance section at Waterstones Piccadilly? Well I went in this week to try and find the new Alexis Hall in the wild and guess what… it had gone! They’ve reorganised it all already and now it’s smaller (I think) and at the back. The whole of that front section is now Crime and Thriller. I have no words but I do have a few pictures.
I say it’s smaller but I’m not actually sure, it just felt more cramped. The photo above is the main section and then on the left there is a Pride section – which is a mix of fiction and non fiction LGTBQIA+ books – including some Alexis Hall but not the one I was looking for!
Then the main romance bit is to the right. I don’t think it was properly set up – there were still gaps all over place on shelves elsewhere on the floor and trolleys of books too as you can see in the picture below.
I only had about ten minutes to wander around – so I couldn’t properly dig into what had gone awol, but I thought I should probably do an update as I’d been so excited about the old configuration…
Quite a restrained month to be honest, I’m fairly impressed with myself. One charity shop buy, one second hand purchase, one vintage store pick and then the two airport purchases which are on a separate photo because I lent them out to my dad as soon as I got home! Will the restraint last? Hard to tell given that there’s a lot of good stuff coming out at the moment, but I will try!
As I mentioned on Monday, I made a trip into town ash Sunday and did two bookshops. And as The Works seemed to have a lot of books I have read and recommended it seemed like I should do a post for those of you who fancy a 3 for £6 deal (or two)
Firstly: please note my first sighting of The Unsinkable Greta James in the wild – I didn’t see the hardback in stores (I ordered it) but here is the paperback. Next to it is The Fiancée Farce, which I own but haven’t read, but I have enjoyed some of Alexandria Bellefleure’s other romances. Also on the TBR pile are The Fake Up and The Setup – I will get to it, I promise. And then there is very recent BotW Mrs Nash’s Ashes!
Next across from that is probably the bookshelf in a store I have read most of this year! There’s a healthy stack of Christina Lauren:Roomies was a BotW, I have Josh and Hazel’s Guide to Not Dating on the pile and I’ve read but didn’t love Dating You, Hating You – it violated my no sabotage at work as a love language rule! Daisy Jones and the Six has already had one mention this week but it was also a BotW, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo was a BotW as was The Thursday Murder Cluband The Man Who Died Twicewas too – and I wrote a whole series post. The Marlow Murder Club is one of the crop of similar series that have cropped up since – and I’ve read that and the sequel and they were fun.
Slightly less here, but still a good group – although now we’re out of the 3 for £6 group. There’s one of my favourite books of last year – Lessons in Chemistry – which I recently loaned to a colleague who loved it – and two Ali Hazelwoods Love Theoretically and The Love Hypothesis. I’ve read all of the Heartstopper – not long now for the final part – but I haven’t (yet) got into Sarah Jane Maas (although I have a friend who loves her), or Elle Kennedy or Lucy Score (or Colleen Hoover on the last shelves) and I had a bad experience with my first Tessa Bailey so I know she’s not for me – although (again) I know people who love her.
And finally, actually this is the one with the most I’ve read! Dead Romantics was a BotW (as was Poston’s latest don’t forget!), I’ve read The Kiss Curse too (and have Hex Appeal on the Kindle too), I’ve read both the Amy Leas and the Richard Coles and another Heartstopper. I read The Problem with Perfect last week – it was another of my flawed options for BotW this week – Weather Girl is not as good as Business or Pleasure but it is fun. I’ve read Wisteria Society of Lady Scoundrels and it didn’t work for me, but as it has sequels (one of which you can see here!) it clearly did for others. I would rather read Gail Carriger – but if you’ve read her you might like it. And finally I really need to read the Jesse Sutanto.
And so to sum up: an excellent time for you to go to The Works – as long as you don’t mind carrying books home with you. You’ll have to wait until the next Books Incoming to see what I took home with me though!
It’s Father’s Day today – so Happy Father’s Day to all the dads out there. And for those of you who don’t have your dad around any more, I hope you’re doing ok too.
I was thinking about some of my favourite dads in books for today’s post – and threw the question out to my little sister who suggested Mr Bennet from Pride and Prejudice (mainly for the comebacks not the actual parenting), Bridget’s dad from Bridget Jones’s Diary and Arthur Weasley from Harry Potter, all of which I can get on board with. I’d add Sam Vimes from Discworld to the list – in several of the Watch books he worried that he wasn’t a “good” man, in his early days he was a drunk, but he’s devoted to his son, Young Sam, and comes home every night to read Where’s My Cow to him – which when you know Vimes is quite a big turn around.
I’m also going to throw Thursday Next‘s dad into the mix – ok so he’s travelling through time hiding from the Chronoguard, but he drops in on Thursday whenever he can and tries to help and offer her advice when he can. Technically not their dad but their guardian, I’m still going to include Arthur from The House in the Cerulean Sea because he will do anything to keep his kids safe. On the same front, Mr Tom from Goodnight Mr Tom gets the nod from me too – after all he does adopt William – and by the end of the book William is calling him dad. Obviously the traditional choice in any list of great dad’s in books is Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, so you can take that one as read.
What I will say is that in writing this, I realised how many of my favourite books have dead or absent dads, which is a bit of a concern – but then the dead parent is a big thing in children’s books of a certain age – and often the drama in a historical novels is generated by the death of a father and the impact it has on the family – see Calamity of Mannerings most recently, but also a lot of the Georgette Heyer heroines and a lot of the more recent historical romance heroines too.
Which dads would you add to the list? Let me know in the comments.
Ok so it’s not an airport, but another place where you often find yourself buying a book at the last minute is the railway station, so I took a wander around Euston’s W H Smith bookstore (it’s separate to the newsagent one) to see what you might be able to pick up if you’re heading to the Midlands, North West England or Scotland!
Firstly let’s take a moment for the window display for Bonnie Garmus’s Lessons in Chemistry, one of my favourite books of last year and now in paperback and still getting plenty of publicity and prominent placement. And yes, I know that some of this stuff is paid for sometimes, but I’ve seen displays in the indies as well (Bookends in Carlisle had one too).
This is the front and centre display as you come in – and you may notice that I’ve read three of these new releases already: Romantic Comedy,Happy Place and Pineapple Street which is quite something even for me given that they all came out in April!
I’ve read only one on the back where they’ve got the non-fiction – and although I didn’t love I want to die but I want to eat ttchbokki, I’m glad to see it getting some shelf time.
Lots of the usual suspects here – like Daisy Jones, the Richard Osmans, a stack of Colleen Hoover, some Lee Child, a load of thrillers, the big literary fiction books and the Richard Coles, but it’s nice to see The Three Dahlias in its shiny new paperback edition.
On the non-fiction front, Prince Harry’s book is still there – but so is the parody Spare Us! I’ve mentioned Femina before and I also have The Premonitions Bureau, Village in the Third Reich and Nazi Billionaires on the Kindle. But it’s very self help heavy apart from that and we know that’s not what I read very often!
It does feel like a very curated selection aimed at travellers – which isn’t a surprise – but it is a much better selection than the old W H Smith ever had – so from that side of thing I suppose the chaos and disruption while they were remodelling it all is mitigated a little!
Ashley Weaver has a new book out this week in her new series, so it seems like a good time to remind people of her last series – the inter-war set Amory Ames mysteries. I wrote about them last summer – so you can see a bit more about them here, but they’re historical cozy mysteries with a romantic subplot to them. As I said in that post, the closest comparator is probably the Royal Spyness series – the romantic relationship at the centre of this gives you some similar vibes to the one in that, although Georgie’s Darcy is more mysterious behaviour open to misinterpretation than Amory’s Milo is. Amory is more worldly wise (in some ways at least) than Daisy Dalrymple, but not as genuinely open minded let alone as feisty and independent as Phryne Fisher. The first two are still in Kindle Unlimited, and they are the sort of series that used to show up at The Works so you have a fighting chance of finding them in the shops too. I still haven’t read any of Weaver’s new series, which are set in World War Two, but I’m sure I’ll get around to it at some point!
And so this is the third bookshop I visited in the first week of March – walking from work to the Cockpit for John Finnemore took me right past Daunt Books on Marylebone High Street so how could I resist?
And if you’ve never been in there, it’s deceptively big. Double fronted and going right back and down and up as you can see. They were setting the event space up as I was wandering, but sadly I was insufficiently vigilant to check who it was for – partly because I knew I couldn’t stay!
There was a really good selection of crime actually – here’s another side of that same pillar with another HM the Queen Investigates, the new Miss Marple short stories and the fresh Tom Hindle that I haven’t got around to reading yet because: binging stuff I shouldn’t be.
Over in the Children and Young Adult section there were loads of books proving that the dystopian future/alternative present genre is still going strong, but also this table with the Rainbow Rowell short stories and the Agency of Scandal which I own but haven’t really seen in the wild before.
And there were some good tables of non fiction too – bookshop trips are often where I find stuff I hadn’t heard about. The Patrick Radden Keefe is actually an older book of his, reissued to look more like Empire of Pain, but I think I would basically read any of the forward-facing books in this picture. I mean if I got time for it…
And finally, as you’ve already seen the book I bought in last week’s Books Incoming, this was my first sighting in the wild of the paperback of Lessons in Chemistry – on its release day no less. I’m hoping that the fact that the table looks a little bit empty is because they’d already sold so many copies!
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 